welcome to my unboxing and first look at
what should be fairly evident based on the outside of the box this is the half
XB from Cooler Master which is a continuation of the ever popular half
Series so it started with the half 932
which was an ATX mid tower that offered
extreme airf flow for the price and for
the form factor I mean the whole thing was basically like mesh and fans and
making sure that all your system components stayed cool then we saw the
lower cost half 922 then I believe we saw the half X then the half
912 now we have a half Cube case now
Cube cases are more common with some of
these sort of bouquey case guys like we've seen a cube from uh Le and Lee
we've seen cubes from Mountain mods and case Labs over the years uh but most of
the mainstream guys don't really do cubes so I'm really excited to see what
sort of a a more experienced Casemaker
like Cooler Master can do with this form
factor the cube form factor is sort of unique because what it does do is it
gives a lot of room that you normally don't find in an enclosure above and
potentially below the motherboard because the motherboard
usually takes up a lot of space inside the case not because it is actually
physically large I mean a motherboard is thin but it takes up a lot of space
inside the chassis because you can't really put anything over top of it it's
it's just sort of it's sort of full so what you can do by lying the motherboard
down flat is you can get access to sort of unique ways to use the space so first
we see the packing material so you got a little about an inch and then a little
more than an inch on the sides and I mean honestly for a pretty this is
pretty light case considering its size and the steel construction it feels very
very sturdy like you could probably yeah just put all your weight on this thing I
mean like I said an experienced Casemaker like Cooler Master you don't
expect them to make any new bearers like it being kind of flimsy like you see
with mountain mods enclosures although those are all aluminum which is harder
to make more rugged and more strong so the first thing we're going to do is get
all these panels unscrewed actually not quite all of them cuz I want to show you the outside first so on the side you
find ventilation you expect that from a half series enclosure you also find
Handy Dandy handles that can be used for carrying the case around and you can use
to maneuver it quite easily these are not levers so you don't pull up on these
to open up the side panel the side panel is removed by removing the screws and
then sliding it back so those are just for air flow and for handling the case
the other side is identical same thing you got handles you got airflow holes so
nothing that you haven't seen before like 10 seconds ago all right on the
back we got a 120 mil fan more ventilation again as we've come to
expect 2 80 mil fans standard 7 PCI
slots as well as what appears to be a cable tie um and a protruded power
supply mounting cage so what that does is that gives us more room inside the
case for things like cable management cuz remember your power supply is going
to be like this long and then you're going to have a bunch of more space on
the end for where the cables need to come out so by doing this case
manufacturers instead of making their entire chassis another inch deeper can
just protrude the power supply a little bit and I guess sort sort of cheat give
you a smaller enclosure that way with just a little bit of a bump out the back
in the top you see what appears to be a 200 mm fan mounting uh fan mounting
spacing with rubber grommets and what is a very see-through mesh so while I like
to see Windows to see into my chassis and see what you know the cool Le stuff
that I put in there I don't mind a thin mesh like this because you can as you
can here as you can see you can see through it quite clearly so you'll get a
very good aesthetic even though it's not using a window on the front of the case
we've got two 120 mm fans with more mesh
two 5 and 1/4 in Bay two hot swap 3 and
1/2 in Drive sleds which are really cool because here check this out they're
compatible with 3 and 1/2 in or 2 and 1/2 in so this is that standard
rubberized uh grommet Mount thing that we've seen with Cooler Master in the
past you can put a 2 and 1 half inch Drive in using these holes more
ventilation on the drive cage itself and instead of bending it like we used to
you actually just slide it open and then clip it into place just like that with a
drive on it this allows it to be a lot more sturdy whereas on those other ones
like I know I've commented on this a lot in the past where I say yeah it looks
really flimsy once you put a drive in it it's okay now I no longer have to say
that it just doesn't look flimsy and once you put a drive in it it should be
that much that much more okay so those
lock into place quite nicely you've also got your front power reset uh indic uh
excuse me power LED you've got hold on
nope Power LED is the illuminated button here that's your hard drive activity LED
microphone headphone and two USB 3 ports
USB 3 is finally standard on pretty much
every single new case which is great I
remember it was so frustrating for so long uh you know half the chassis didn't
have USB 3 the other half of them had it but with a pass through that plugged
into the back of your motherboard so in order to put together your half XP
you're going to want to oh look at that wow considering the price of this case
that is a very very solid side panel I mean that's the thing again guys like
Cooler Master they do not screw around when it comes to the overall build
quality of the case so even though it's pretty light it's not like they're using
lightweight material I mean look at this they've punched out most of this panel
but it still has only this much Flex to it and I'm putting a lot of force on it
you can see from yeah no still good yeah you can see
how much force I'm putting on it it does not Bend at all extremely rigid love to
see that because it just means that there's going to be less strain on the
components if anything does happen if you're shipping the system which is a
concern if you're a system builder like NC you know you look at it and you go oh
well you know H that's going to put a lot of strain on the motherboard when
that when that case flexes like that not going to have that happen with a
well-built chassis so in terms of uh included accessories you've got tons of
cable management ties this is way more than I'm used to seeing with a case you
have a whole whack load of 2 and 1/2 in Drive sleds and I'll show you where
these go in a minute included speaker as well as all the screws you'll need to
assemble your system so once we get inside let's start on this side check
this out dedicated 2 and 1/2 in Drive mounting so with those two front hot
swaps you can mount up to six ssds in this case completely natively all you do
is throw your ssds in the little rails slide them in and it's pretty much what
you're used to seeing in terms of hard drive mounting except it's an entire
dedicated 2 and 1/2 in cage and again extremely wellb built at the back of the
case remember those 2 80 mil fans those are going to be directly cooling your
your ssds here and honestly I probably
wouldn't install anything here I just use them as passive airf flow the 5 and
1/4 in bays are completely toolless so you open them up lock them just like
that and you can remove them very easily and this is a design we've seen on the
half series before just by uh folding
back these little tabs which don't even look like a tab they're very well
integrated into the aesthetic design or the case which is very industrial and
then you use the toolless mounting in order to throw your 5 and a/4 in drive
in there lots of space at the back for longer Optical drives and cable
management speaking of cable management there are tons of cable management
options in this case check this out Cable Management Loops here I love these
things they're awesome they help you keep things tidy look at all the cable
management Loops that they've popped into the bottom here so you can see
those here all the cables that need to run even like they've even put in
dedicated Cable Management Loops for these fans at the back so you can go
cable here tie it down here tie it down there and get everything over to the
power supply area where you can see more cable management Loops more cable
management Loops the inter for the hot
swap 3 and A4 3 and 1/2 in Drive Bay in the front so single Molex power then you
run two SATA data cables in order to activate those you've got noise
dampening foam so this is under the power supply as well as a removable
filter that goes under the power supply itself they've also lifted the power
supply up a little bit and I'm glad to see that because I recently had a power
supply die in uh in an older defin R2
case from fractal this was totally my bad but what I did is I put a 120 mm fan
power supply in it fan down and then I put the case onto a carpeted area yeah
that thing died it totally starved from airf flow I didn't even think about it
as I was kind of throwing it under a desk and not thinking I was using it as a file server so this would have saved
my power supply right here cuz even though it wouldn't have been optimal it
would have been able to grab some air from the inside of the case by bringing
it up S through these gaps so it wouldn't have completely suffocated so
that yeah would have saved my bacon let's move up into the top of the
chassis where we find a couple cool things so number one is the removable
motherboard tray which you can take off just by removing four screws here and
lifting the whole motherboard tray out that'll make it easier to Cable manage
the bottom of the case as well as you know install all your components outside
of the case and then put them in personally I'd probably try and do it
without it because yeah my my hands are pretty small but I can handle it if you
have larger hands though that could be a boon for you huge CPU cutouts so you'll
have no problems installing the back plates of larger CPU coolers uh even
when the even when everything is still in the chassis even when the motherboard
is already installed on the motherboard tray you can see also that those front
120 mm fans also have 140 mm fan mounts
and the spacing looks right for a radiator which is outstanding because
you could put a dual 120 mm radiator here looks like you could pretty easily
fit ah yes you could easily fit another
120 mm radiator here that looks like enough spacing so you could have at
least a triple triple radiator water cooling setup in here with no problems
at all Aesthetics are awesome I mean if you're going to have that nice loose
mesh on the top so you can see everything inside the case then you
better make sure you're including things with black cables so black cabled fans
that are either either three pin or Molex another black cabled fan and all
black cables for the front panel connectors including the uh audio the uh
Power the and the LEDs the USB 3 as well
as yeah that's pretty much it hold on a sec guys here's something cool guys
check this out with a little bit of modding you could install a seven a
seven PCI slot motherboard but you could install a dual slot card in the very
bottom this is a big deal if you want to do sort of massive SLI configurations as
some boards don't have the correct spacing uh to put your last dual slot
card here because it just doesn't really work that way so check this out you can
put it here and then all you'd have to do is where you see you can put your
side panel on you can see the card's going to get lots of ventilation through these holes right over here so no
problems there so all you'd have to do is in order to use the uh rear exhaust
on your card potentially if you have a rear exhaust card is I'd probably you
know Dremel some holes kind of here so that you can uh you can get access to
that air flow so very cool stuff the Crazy Russian spotted that he's guest
helping me uh film today so kudos to him
for uh for noticing that that's awesome and I think that actually pretty much
covers it I just want to show you guys yet more cable management uh Loops right
here and here above the 5 and 1/4 in and the 3 and 1/2 inch cages I guess if I
had one thing to caution you guys about before buying this case is make sure
that you have an external storage solution because it only really supports
two 3 and 1/2 in drives other than that this guy is completely ready for SSD
more than anything else thank you for checking out my unboxing first look at
the half XP from Cooler Master don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips
from boxing's reviews and other computer
videos here's something I didn't notice until we were putting the case back
together but check this out so those super sturdy plastic handles I showed
you on the outside are actually reinforced by this piece of metal here
that's part of why they're so strong and they're not going anywhere because
you're picking up the chassis by the actual chassis not by a piece of plastic
that's attached to the side panel which is attached to the chassis good stuff
again just great design choices overall on this case